![]() ![]() He had inherited his father’s taste for good drink and good food, learning French with communist family friends in Paris, and he did little academic work, though he fed his mind. For a period he worked in a Typhoo Tea factory, and hoped to go to art school, but he went to his father’s Oxford college, Balliol, where he studied English (1961-64). He was sent to school at Tettenhall college in Wolverhampton, then to Aston Technical College (now Birmingham City University), both of which he disliked, but he developed an intense habit of reading. His parents divorced in 1951, and Tim was taken into care by Birmingham council. View image in fullscreen Tim Hilton was tasked by Anthony Blunt of the Courtauld Institute with teaching the English tradition of art criticism Anita Brookner taught the French. His escape was serious cycling, for which he had talent, and it was an elderly member of the free-wheeling Clarion cycling club who first told him about Ruskin. It gave Tim a horror of formal meetings that persisted throughout his life. He and Margaret left the party in 1956, but until then had been organisers of weekly meetings that their son – known as Timoshenko after a Red Army marshal rather than by his given name, John – was obliged to attend. ![]() Rodney was a founder member of the Communist Party Historians Group, which contributed to the split in the British Communist party following Stalin’s death in 1953. Tim’s contrariness stemmed from his childhood as the only son of Margaret (nee Palmer) and Rodney Hilton, communists who had met at Oxford in the 30s and became academics at the University of Birmingham, the city where Tim was born. There was a good spell as Alistair Horne fellow at St Antony’s College, Oxford (1976-77), but also cold winters in holiday accommodation in Bembridge, Isle of Wight, where the most important Ruskin archive was then kept. ![]() He went through considerable privations to achieve this. Tim’s starting point was that the 39 volumes of the library edition of Ruskin’s works were “incomplete and often intentionally misleading”, and this meant starting again. ![]()
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